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THE LOVE AND CARE OF 
GOD, BENEATH THE BOTTOM 
OF ALL THINGS BESIDE 




Class 
Book. 



Copyright N°. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE BOTTOM NEVER DROPS 
r. STILL UNDERNEATH 
N AND FAILURE ARE 

THE EVERLASTING ARMS 






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N ^ 



UNDERNEATH ARE THE 
EVERLASTING ARMS 




UNDERNEATH ARE 

THE EVERLASTING 

ARMS 



BY 



ALBERT JOSIAH LYMAN 



l\ 




THE PILGRIM PRESS 

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 



/#773 5 



Copyright, 1910 
By Luther H. Cary 




THE • PLIMPTON • PRESS 
[W . D • O] 

NORWOOD • MASS • U • S • A 



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©CI.A273429 



UNDERNEATH ARE THE 
EVERLASTING ARMS 



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UNDERNEATH what are the Ever- 
lasting Arms? Underneath our very 
doubt that there are such arms, that is 
to say, underneath the fact, whatever 
it be, that seems to us the deepest fact 
of all; underneath the feeling, whatever 
it be, that seems to us the deepest feel- 
ing of all. 

We are not in this answer amusing 
ourselves with a mere turn of words; 
we are meeting squarely the instant 
challenge of the intellect. "Under- 
neath"; underneath what? And we 
answer with an equal promptness — 
underneath what we call the very 
"bottom facts," underneath the very 
foundations of conscious thought, under- 
neath our very misgiving about the 
arms, still deeper stretch the arms them- 
selves — warm, eternal, divine. 

For it would almost seem as though 
a pause were intended to be introduced 
just after the word "underneath" like 

5 



I 




THE EVERLASTING ARMS 



the long dash or bracketed blank space 
in the line when something is left out 
in writing, and that we struggling 
mortals are then at liberty to fill in 
that blank space with any title which to 
us describes the deepest and most un- 
manageable fact of life. "Underneath" 
— then comes the eloquent silence 
which our utterance is to fill. What 
shall we put into that open space? Let 
every man put into it that which to 
him is deepest. Some of us would per- 
haps write in the words "trouble, sick- 
ness, bereavement" as the profoundest 
experience we know. Then the sen- 
tence would read: "Underneath trouble 
are the Everlasting Arms." Some would 
introduce the word temptation. Then 
it would read: "Underneath temptation 
are the Everlasting Arms." Many a 
man would say, The deepest and most 
inveterate fact I know is my own mad 
folly. Then write that in. 

To some, parental responsibility 
seems the deepest fact in life. Put 
that in. To others of different temper, 
nature's wide force and law may appear 
to be the fundamental fact in the world. 
Then write that in. In certain specu- 



THE EVEELASTING ARMS 



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lative moods a vast, inexorable fate 
seems the final statement of the uni- 
verse. Then write in even that. So the 
sentence will read: "Underneath be- 
reavement, or temptation, or parent- 
hood, or nature, or sin, or fate itself, 
are the Everlasting Arms." 

Fill up that white, vacant space in 
the line with anything which to you 
gives the sense of being the uncontrol- 
lable and final force at the bottom of 
life, — the very undertone of all; then 
when you are sure you have it in the 
sentence, go on to complete it — under- 
neath even that are "the Everlasting 
Arms." 

This, then, is our simple but vital 
theme — the love and care of God as 
being beneath the bottom of all things 
beside. 

This is not only the parental, it is 
the passionately parental conception 
of the Deity. The image regnant 
in this old tingling utterance is, per- 
haps, the most intense expression of 
the Fatherhood of God to be found in 
the entire Old Testament literature. 
It anticipates that quivering "Abba 
Father" from the lips of Jesus. 






VJ 



THE EVERLASTING ARMS 



The appeal is to the sense of weak- 
ness, of necessary dependence upon a 
Higher Power, which we ever feel so 
profoundly, so pathetically, at the very 
foundation of life, from babyhood to 
old age, and which Schleiermacher held 
to be the essence of religion itself. 

So weak, so dependent, fatigued, fall- 
ing, fallen, something catches us from 
beneath and buoys us up, and this 
nameless lift from beneath, the inspired 
Hebrew writer declares to be nothing 
else or less than the arm of the living 
God. 

But is this anything more than a 
poet's dream? Is this passionately 
parental view of the deep heart of 
the universe warranted? Is it true? 
How do we know? How can we know ? 
Who can fathom the infinite? Many 
facts in this stern world do not, on the 
surface, look as though the supreme 
force were love. 

Let us think about the matter a little. 

The Idea of God 

First. — As to the warrant for the 
parental idea of God. Four great ge- 
neric ideas or modes of regarding the 




THE EVERLASTING ARMS 



9 



Infinite Being have attracted the minds 
of men : 

1. The creative — God as Creator. 

2. The monarchical — God as Sover- 
eign. 

3. The judicial — God as Judge. 
Calvinism presents the solid welding 

together of these three conceptions. In 
our time a fourth conception has come 
into relief. It is at once pantheistic 
and scientific. It is the idea of God as 
a vast, all-pervasive, universal force, — 
an infinite but unknowable energy, to 
recall the favorite phrase of a now 
rather decadent agnosticism. 

Now, the parental thought of God is 
larger and finer as well as truer than 
any one of these other conceptions 
because it includes what is true in them 
all, and adds its own warm pulse throb 
besides, 

God is Creator; but fatherhood is 
creative. 

God is just; but so is fatherhood 
judicial. 

God is Monarch; but fatherhood is 
sovereign. 

God is Force; but is force any 
less force because it is fatherly as well? 



1 



THE EVERLASTING ARMS 



Right here, however, we must stop 
a moment, because here is the very 
firing line of our modern battle of faith. 
I say battle of faith, because faith is 
always a fight. Faith is not certainty. 
Certainty is vision. Faith is a struggle 
toward certainty, or, in a practical 
way of putting it, faith is the noble, 
mental push, which, even without the 
certainty of full vision, dares to swing 
off upon the weight of evidence. 

What, substantially, is the position of 
the modern educated but non-Christian 
mind? It is to the effect that God is 
the ultimate but unknown Power. It 
may go still further and assert that 
nothing like what we call fatherhood is 
in that Power. We can believe, you 
say, in a tremendous, universal force 
filling immensity, its foam sparkling 
with starry worlds; but that force can- 
not be personal, cannot be parental. 
Here is the edge of the intellectual quest 
and battle of our time. 

We must be fair to ourselves as to this 
modern misgiving. It is not a sign of 
moral delinquency, but rather of in- 
tellectual life. r / 

But think a moment. We are not 




THE EVERLASTING ARMS 



11 



afraid to join issue at this point. Do 
our scientific friends remember that 
nature justifies us in using the word 
Father as conveying the true and final 
conception of the Infinite? Is it not 
precisely as scientific to say, Father- 
God, as to say Force-God? Fatherhood 
is the highest form of nature's force. 
Self-sacrificial human parenthood is, so 
far as we know, the highest and final 
product of the evolutional processes, 
and we reason back from the final 
product of the universe to the ultimate 
source of the universe. 

The men of science tell us that in 
reasoning up toward the infinite we 
must reason from the known to the 
unknown. Very well. But if so, then 
surely we may reason from the highest 
part of the known to the highest part of 
the unknown. The highest part of the 
known is what we call personality, 
thought, love, will. If I am to climb 
to God on your ladder of facts, you shall 
not take down the upper half of your 
own ladder. If you reason from force to 
an infinite force, I reason from love to an 
infinite love, and this line of the reason- 
ing is precisely as scientific as the other. 



^ 



THE 



What is the upper half of the ladder of 
nature? Personal consciousness. I will 
stand there, then, in order to reason up 
to God. The force that is coiled in the 
brain of man is mightier than the force 
of cyclone or avalanche. But the top 
round of this top half of nature is love, 
and the tip of this top, the very minaret 
and finial of nature, is the self-sacrifice 
of a mother's love, as Drummond well 
argued. 1 I will stand even there, then, 
and reason up to an infinite love. I 
reason from the highest thing produced 
in nature to the highest of the force 
that produced it. And this is sound 
reasoning. The logic is straight and 
strong, and holds like ten Titans. But 
the logic glows at the finial. It is like 
a white mountain summit when the sun- 
rise catches it, and it flashes with rose 
and gold. 

The evolutionary philosophy itself 
must back up into this position, namely, 
that the Supreme Being possesses that 
which is the eternal prototype of con- 
sciousness in man. 

The late Professor John Fiske of Har- 

1 Drummond, The Ascent of Man. The Evolution 
of a Mother. 



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THE EVERLASTING ARMS 



13 



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Vi 



vard, an evolutionist and Spencerian, 
writing of his master, Herbert Spencer, 
declares: "According to Mr. Spencer, 
the energy which is manifested through- 
out the knowable universe is the same 
energy that wells up in us as conscious- 
ness." And Professor Fiske therefore 
maintains that according to the logic of 
evolution and of biology, the source of 
the universe must be stated in terms 
of the highest product of the universe. 

I have sometimes illustrated the mat- 
ter to myself after this fashion: Suppose 
that from some high rock-cistern in the 
far hills you lead a line of piping down 
into the valley, through thicket and 
mire, until, ascending, it curves up be- 
neath the cellar of your house and passes 
through every story to where the current 
of water is released to play as a foun- 
tain upon your roof -gar den. A learned 
investigator informs you that he has 
made an astonishing discovery, namely, 
that the prismatic play of your roof- 
fountain is evolved from the shelter of 
the sleeping rooms beneath, and this 
again is evolved from the stuffiness of 
the parlor floor, and this from the 
sordidness of the kitchen, and this from 



)l 




THE EVERLASTING ARMS 



the squalor of the cellar, and this from 
the very slag and slime itself beneath 
your house. "I have traced that pipe," 
he explains, "all the way down and this 
is what it comes from. This is evolu- 
tion." What will you say to that man? 
If you say what you think, which is not 
always the politest way, you will say: 
" My friend, allow me to remark that 
you are almost, if not quite, an idiot. 
Don't you know that the water has to 
come down first, in order to rise as it 
does? Trace up as well as trace down. 
The play of the fountain at the summit 
offers the true standpoint where you can 
adequately judge how high in the hills 
my rock-reservoir is and what is the 
quality of the water there!" So of the 
light which the evolutional energy at 
the summit of its process casts back 
upon the "hollow of God's hand." 
: The old Hebrew metaphor is not, 
then, poetry merely. It is poetry rest- 
ing upon sound reason. It is inspired 
truth. "He that formed the eye, shall he 
not see?" He that formed the soul for 
love, shall he not love? You cannot 
light your torch by an iceberg, and the 
flame of parental passion, as we know it 




THE EVERLASTING ARMS 15 



vi 




in man, could never have emerged from 
an iceberg God. The stream does not 
rise higher than its source, or run with 
different water. If a mollusk in a mil- 
lion years can develop into Plato, then 
that wonderful Platonic tendency in the 
mollusk argues something back of the 
mollusk as high as Plato. The universe 
culminates in love only because it began 
with love. 

We conclude then that we have reason 
to believe that the Biblical conception 
of God is the rational conception and 
that "underneath are the Everlasting 
Arms." 

Second. — How does this truth apply 
to ourselves in practical experience? 
How does it not apply! How close 
it comes home to parents, for ex- 
ample! Parents are a worried lot. 
They are anxious as to how this boy is 
to get on at school or in the office; how 
that daughter is to secure a more ample 
education when there is hardly enough 
coming in to make both ends meet. It 
seems to me that it must be like music 
to you fathers and mothers if you can 
realize that the Everlasting Arms are 
under your own arms as you hold up 



I 






16 THE EVERLASTING ARMS 

your child. You are nervous when your 
dear ones are out of your sight. They 
are never out of His sight. 

But let us inquire a little more closely 
what some of these "bottom facts" of 
experience, as we call them, are, which, 
after all, rest upon God's arms still 
deeper beneath them. May I briefly 
mention three? They are Doubt, Pain, 
and Sin. 

Doubt 

1st. — As has been intimated ear- 
lier, Doubt is, apparently, in our mod- 
ern time, one of these ultimate states 
of mind. And it is most apparently 
fundamental, and I may add terrible, 
in its vague, subtle, ethical forms, 
and this is why doubt is such a deep 
and appalling thing to woman, when 
it comes to her. I am sure that the 
relation of the doubt and skepticism 
of our age to woman has often been 
overlooked in our mannish discussions. 
A man doubts with his brain, and can 
endure it. A woman doubts with her 
soul as Well as her brain, and cannot so 
well endure it. 

Faith is life with womanhood. Oh, 



ARMS 




the desperate ache in the feminine 
nature when it begins really to question 
whether there is any God, or, if there is, 
whether he has any care for us. But 
doubt is not the bottom fact. The 
arms are underneath our very doubt 
about the arms. 

What is doubt? Half of doubt is 
pain. Doubt is like the sick child's 
blow back at the very arm that is hold- 
ing it, and the face that is so tenderly 
watching it. But you, mother, do not let 
your poor little child fall, when, in sud- 
den anger, or in a spasm of suffering, the 
child twists itself back and strikes at 
your face. God is no harsher than we 
are. God knows our doubt is half pain, 
and he will not discard us because of 
our doubt. 

I have said doubt is not the deepest 
thing. May I venture to give you one 
moment of metaphysics to show this. 

Well, then, you doubt because you 
think, don't you? If you didn't think, 
you wouldn't doubt. And you think be- 
cause you have the power to think, do 
you not? If you didn't have the power 
to think, you wouldn't think. But 
power to think is a positive thing, not 




THE EVERLASTING ARMS 



negative, isn't it? Certainly. Then, 
even at the first touch of a rigid analysis, 
you have passed from negative to posi- 
tive, that is, from doubt to something 
there is no doubt about, namely, power. 
And that positive finality which all 
power implies, even the power to doubt, 
I call God. God is a Saxon name for a 
fact. You may call that ultimate, posi- 
tive fact by many names. Jesus called 
it Father, and as we have already 
argued, it is scientifically reasonable to 
define the ultimate source of all things 
in the terms of its highest product, and 
that is parental affection. But that 
is not the point at this moment. The 
point at this moment is that the 
Ultimate Fact, whatever it is, is deeper 
than your doubt about it. One bold 
thrust of the metaphysical javelin and 
your final negation is pierced through 
and through. Doubt is not the " bottom 
fact" and cannot be. 

Do you imagine, my skeptical friend, 
that your doubt is the outer void which 
stretches on forever? No. The Posi- 
tive God, whoever he is, is still on the 
outside of that outer void. The laby- 
rinth of your doubt is like the labyrinth 



THE EVERLASTING ARMS 



19 



U 




of stairways, gangways, blind passages 
below deck in the great ocean steamer, 
in which the landsman, bewildered, 
loses his way; but all the while the 
mighty steamer is carrying him, laby- 
rinth and all, onward to his destination. 

Pain 

%d. — The truth of the Divine Paren- 
tal Love lifting at the very foundations 
of life applies also to pain. The Ever- 
lasting Arms are underneath pain. 

In times of distress, pain seems the 
deepest thing in the world. Let me point 
you to a deeper, namely, the checks and 
limitations which God has set to pain. 
Have you ever thought of the limitations 
of pain? Have you ever thought of 
the secondary effects of one person's 
pain in making other people suffer less? 
Is yonder invalid's home the most cheer- 
less place in town? Have you ever 
thought how much friendship gathers 
in the wake of pain — how much pain 
has to do with the development of the 
friendship of this world? It is pain 
very largely that develops friendship. 

The two qualities of friendship which 
pain develops are tenderness and tenac- 



20 THE EVERLASTING ARMS 

ity. Our experience of life changes 
somewhat. In the early flush of life, 
under the jet of its warm, young blood, 
we want something else in friendship, 
something more impulsive, glowing, pas- 
sionate; but we get past that. 

You remember Sidney Dobell's 
quaint, strong line: — 

" There's something wrong in the cup, boys, 
There's something ill wi' the bread." 

That is what we come to feel. Then fol- 
lows loss, bereavement, like a shadow on 
the street. As Charles Kingsley sings: — 

" The merry, merry lark was up and singing, 
And the hare was out and feeding on the lea, 
And the merry, merry bells below were ringing, 
When my child's laugh rang through me. 



" Now the hare is snared and dead beside the snow- 
yard, 
And the lark beside the dreary winter sea; 
Now my baby in his cradle in the churchyard 
Waiteth there until the bells bring me." 

Then, last of all, old age approaches, 
stealing on like a mist over the ocean. 
Once again may I quote those strangely 
chiming lines of dear old Tom Hood: — 

" Spring it is cheery, 
Winter is dreary, 
Green leaves hang, but the brown must fly; 



THE EVERLASTING ARMS 21 

When he's forsaken, 

Withered and shaken, 

What can an old man do but die ? " 

And in all these changes, what we come 
at last deep down to want in a friend- 
ship are these two things, tenderness 
and tenacity. Well, we have them in 
God's friendship. Tenderness — that is 
the "arms." Tenacity — that is the 
"everlasting." Beneath our pain some- 
thing still pulses and presses. It is the 
Arm, lasting — everlasting. 

But again you say, "Prove it." 
Prove it? I prove it by the deeper 
analysis of pain itself, which shows the 
moment you cut into it a principle of 
self-limitation, a principle of transmu- 
tation of pain into power, and so into 
a higher peace, which nothing but 
Intelligent Love could have either con- 
ceived or introduced. I prove it by 
the words of the greatest sufferers who, 
from the summits of anguish, have 
looked out upon visions of victory. / 
prove it by the intuition of the agony of 
Calvary. 

Pain cannot be the deepest fact of 
life. If so, the air was made for the 
hurricane, and clouds for the thun- 




i 




M) 



THE EVERLASTING ARMS 

derbolt, and that cannot be. Pain is 
provisional. It is educative. It is dis- 
ciplinary. It is not final. 

A man came to me the other day and 
said: "My dear fellow, I have failed in 
business. The bottom has dropped 
out." The first part of his sentence 
was true enough, but not the last part. 
The bottom never drops out. Still under- 
neath pain and failure are the "Ever- 
lasting Arms." 

A man fails in health. He thinks 
that means pauperism to his children. 
Despairing, he is yet brave, and stagger- 
ing up the street he salutes an acquaint- 
ance with his usual nod, and with purple 
lips mutters something about being 
"down on his luck." Does God in 
heaven know what his poor children 
are stumbling against in the thickets? 
Yes, he does know; and even that very 
thicket itself may be on the shortest 
road home. 

And so also the Everlasting Arms 
are not only underneath our indi- 
vidual doubt and pain, but they are 
underneath those more general con- 
ditions of environment and of drift 
in affairs which we often say are 





mainly responsible for our pain 
failure. 

It has been the fashion (until just of 
late — the philosophic apprehension now 
seems swinging into a less fatalistic 
mood) to speak of the "environment" 
as a kind of ultimate, inexorable fact. 
We look out upon the wide field and 
we see much that is calamitous and 
bewildering. Things seem to be either 
drifting or driving on, under intricate 
and irreversible machinery of law, we 
know not whither, like clouds before the 
wind, or boats in a flood; and you say 
the doctrine of the love of God does not 
and cannot apply to this vast welter 
of unmanageable public currents. 

Ah, friend, this conclusion is due 
to a limitation of vision. The parental 
thought of God applies here also, if it 
applies anywhere. Let us be logicians. 
Everywhere or nowhere is the logic of 
the love of God. 

You ask, "Why, then, are not things 
better? " I turn the same question back 
and ask, with equal force, "Why are they 
not worse?" That they are as well as 
they are and struggling upward, when 
they so easily might be worse, indicates 






% 



24 THE EVERLASTING ARMS 

the fundamental uplift of a parental God. 

Oh, take hold of this and take courage, 
you who lament what you call irre- 
trievable calamity and the curse of 
whose curse is that it seems to you 
"irretrievable," — something necessary, 
inescapable, final, something in blood, 
in brain, in heredity, in environment 
— what not, that constantly hems 
you in, smites you down, cuts back 
upon you. Not so, nothing is so deep 
that those arms of God are not deeper. 
We cut ourselves and cry, but God lifts 
and carries child, cut, and cry all together, 
near his face and bosom. 

Perhaps even the very Arm itself is 
hidden from your eyes beneath that 
which it is upholding. Your little child 
does not always see your arm when you 
are holding him. 

Sin 

3d. — Then, last of all, comes 
sweeping into view, like some great, 
gleaming orb, that final and deepest 
application of the truth before us: that 
the helping, rescuing arms of God are 
underneath even that dark mystery 
that we call human sin. 



THE EVERLASTING ASMS 



25 



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I must say only a word of this in 
closing. God forgive us ministers that 
we put this truth so coldly. We talk 
of the doctrine of the "Atonement." 
Oh, that we realized the fact of the 
atonement, and the parental passion 
glowing at the heart of the universe 
that the word atonement means! 

Here, too, we must follow Christ's 
lead in illustrating the divine sentiment 
by the human. You do not repudiate 
your child or drive him from your door 
because he has done wrong, do you? 
You suffer for his sake, if you can only 
save him, do you not? 

A dear friend of mine once carried 
his little boy to one of our Brooklyn 
hospitals to undergo a severe and dan- 
gerous surgical operation. The morn- 
ing of the day of the operation my 
friend was with me a few moments in 
my study. He walked up and down the 
room, clenching his hands in the rest- 
lessness of his anxiety, and said: "O 
my God, if I could only be hurt instead 
of my child!" How far does that feel- 
ing go? Does it stop with surgery? 
You know it goes far enough to take in 
the sin as well as sickness of a child. 



a 








26 



THE EVERLASTING ARMS 



Does it stop at the hospital door? I 
tell you it goes through and through the 
Living God. Let us grasp that principle 
with both hands. 

Here was the feeling in my friend. 
Where did he get it? Where did it 
come from? I am sure I do not need 
to remind you that God himself is 
revealed in that father's feeling. God 
is not up there in a white, cold heaven 
watching it, but he is in it. 

Christianity is the religion which 
tells us this, by its doctrines of Incar- 
nation and Atonement. Mark that 
word incarnation. We hold to no weak, 
diluted orthodoxy. On the contrary, 
we hold that the strong, old faith of 
the Church Universal incorporates this 
very idea of a loving rescue in its 
sublimest form. That word incarna- 
tion — it is a rich, red word. Remem- 
ber that we use the same root-word 
when we say incarnadine. The Gos- 
pel revelation incarnadines our pallid 
thought of God and makes it flush and 
glow. Christ's Incarnation is with lit- 
eral precision the blood-red embodiment 
of God's feeling, his love and suffering. 
We disavow and repel as puerile and 



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THE EVERLASTING ARMS 27 



provincial that false orthodoxy which 
would imply that Christ had one feeling 
and God another. Hear St. Paul's 
majestic peal — "God in Christ, recon- 
ciling the world unto himself." Christ 
is not a lamb slain out in the bleak 
pastures in front of some rock-image of 
a god, in order to make that rock-image 
weep. Atonement is not outside of God 
but in him. 






The Method of Moral Salvation 

Illustrations fail. Take one — Christ's 
own. The domestic analogy comes near- 
est to the heart of the matter. 

You are a father. Your son is way- 
ward and commits some act, not an 
ordinary misdemeanor, but some griev- 
ous public wrong which overwhelms 
you and the family with sadness and 
shame. At length concealment is im- 
possible — he comes to you and con- 
fesses his wrong. What shall you say 
to him? What shall you do to him? 
You cannot command yourself to speak. 
A hot indignation flames in your soul. 
You say, "Go away now, my boy, I 
must be alone," and then you are alone. 
You lock the door and walk up and 








3 



28 THE EVERLASTING ARMS 

down the room in an agony of mental 
conflict. On the one hand is love — 
your love for your own flesh and blood; 
on the other hand, the burning, blister- 
ing sense of the disgrace your child has 
brought on his father's and his mother's 
name. 

How many a parent has passed 
through this desperate experience! But 
at length it is over, and you come forth 
from your room pale but steady, only 
with some after-quiver of the agony 
lingering about the cadence of your 
voice; and then you call your son, and 
you tell him that you — j or give him. 
But now, mark! This is a forgiveness 
that saves your son. It is as far as 
possible from the easy indulgence which 
would make light of the offense and toss 
the whole affair aside with careless good 
nature. Such a forgiveness as that 
would not touch your boy very deeply; 
but this forgiveness, born out of suffer- 
ing, has in it a strangely penetrating 
and vicarious and even remedial and 
redemptive quality, and it pierces 
the heart of your boy. 

But now, mark again! It pierces to 
that in your boy which you have given to 



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ARMS 

him in the mystery of your parenthood. 
It reaches to the you in your son. He 
"comes to himself" as we say; that is, 
he comes to the you that is in him. He 
is "all broken up" as we say — i.e., the 
family nature in him wells up and over- 
comes the defective, merely individual 
nature. He is himself, but he is you. 
He is changed. He is saved. Now 
Christ tells us that through such a lens 
of human life we can look up toward 
the Infinite Father. Sacrificial parent- 
hood incarnates itself in the life of one 
child in order to touch into renewed life 
the latent or disowned image of itself in 
another child. Is this Scriptural? Cer- 
tainly it is. Is it orthodox? Certainly 
it is. It is the orthodoxy of the uni- 
versal living soul of Christendom, but 
stated in the terms of life, and leaving 
its background of mystery without 
attempt to solve it. In Christ's parable 
of The Prodigal, the forgiveness was the 
issue of something which went on in 
the Father's own heart. May we not 
say that Christ is the Father's own 
heart? He is not outside that heart. 

Yonder man, in desperate self-re- 
proach, exclaims: "The deepest gulf I 






w 






I 



know is my own sin, my own mad pas- 
sion, my own accursed folly." Why, no, 
friend, there is something deeper than 
that — the forgiving mercy of your God. 
Have you ever yet come home so 
fallen that your mother would not take 
you in, and does your God love less? 
Where did motherhood light the lamp 
of its immortal love? Your God! Who 
is he? The God you are thinking of 
is a wooden God. Your God is the 
Matterhorn at midnight, not the real 
God. The real God broods and yearns 
and aches for us mortals, for we are of 
his own self, as a child is of the mother's 
self. Christ teaches us that. If you 
accept Christ's teaching you must be- 
lieve that. Love is the same sort of 
love here and in heaven, in mother- 
hood, and in God. We have Christ's 
authority for that in his parable of The 
Prodigal. Two tiny drops of water 
unite by virtue of the same force of 
gravity which holds the planets in on 
their flying march, though crowding 
out against the rim of their bright 
track, as if they rolled against walls of 
invisible crystal. So love is the same 
thing here and in the heavens. 



. ;iwW?$^r$ 






You may have heard the story of 
President Davies. One day he met a 
man whom he had formerly known 
well, a man of cultivated intellect, who 
had become a victim of alcohol, and 
had lost all power of self-restraint. 

"Sir, you can be saved," said the 
president. "Sign the pledge." 

"I have signed and failed," was the 
answer. "I have no strength of will 
to keep the pledge." 

Said President Davies, "7 will be 
your strength to keep the pledge. When 
your appetite burns, come to my house, 
sit with me in my study. I will be a 
shield to you. All that I can do for 
you with my books, my sympathy, my 
experience, my society, I will do. You 
shall first master your appetite, then 
forget it." 

The astonished man said, "Sir, will 
you do all that?" "Surely, I will." 
"Then, I will come." And he did and 
was a rescued man. This is not fan- 
tastic; it is not chimerical; it is the 
reproduction, in human type, of what 
Christ reveals as being the truth at the 
heart of all this wonderful world. 

Deeper than the "bottom facts," as 




n 




THE EVERLASTING ARMS 

you call them, is a love out of sight. We 
cannot always understand it. Neither 
can your baby understand you. Be 
patient with God, dear brother, even 
as you would have your child patient 
with you. Wait and see what things 
really mean. 

So shall the ultimate vision of faith 
grow definite and grow grand, and the 
perturbed spirit will quiet itself in 
peace. A divine buoyancy will lift 
beneath the very foundations of life. 
And when at last the world falls into 
shadow, and death draws near, we shall 
only settle ourselves a little closer, 
nestling down within those Arms Ever- 
lasting, as they carry us still on into 
and across the darkness. 




THE BOTTOM NEVER DROPS 
OUT. STILL UNDERNEATH 
PAIN AND FAILURE ARE 
THE EVERLASTING ARMS 




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THE LOVE AND CARE OF 
GOD, BENEATH THE BOTTOM 
OF ALL THINGS BESIDE 




One copy del. to Cat. Div. 

OCT If 1910 



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